Philology and Language Studies: Tolkien’s Use of English

The 12 essays discussed in this section draw on a variety of approaches including formalist close reading, onomastics, and philosophy. The work includes four essays using stylistics and linguistics approaches to consider questions of aesthetics in relation to Tolkien’s work, five focusing primarily on Tolkien’s poetry, two on Tolkien’s names, and one in the philosophy of science.

Stylistic and Linguistic Approaches

Nils Ivar Agøy considers one of the major controversies in Tolkien scholarship, the quality of Tolkien’s writing, in “Vague or Vivid? Descriptions in The Lord of the Rings” (Tolkien Studies 10: 49–67). A number of critics have claimed that Tolkien’s writing is inferior, starting with Burton Raffel in “The Lord of the Rings as Literature” (Tolkien and the Critics, ed. Neil D. Isaacs and Rose A. Zimbardo [Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968], 218–46), which Agøy cites. He notes the lack of consensus in the scholarship on the quality of Tolkien’s style, summarizing key work by scholars responding to Raffel, including Steve Walker, Jared Lobdell, Brian Rosebury, and John D. Rateliff. Agøy situates his discussion of Tolkien’s descriptions in the context of the author’s own theories expressed in “On Fairy-stories” and of his illustrations. Agøy begins by noting that he is a historian and disclaiming any intention to consider aesthetics and then provides a detailed close reading of all descriptions in the novel. He groups them by categories in terms of specificity, food and objects in houses, and weapons, landscape, and weather. Agøy concludes that Tolkien’s descriptions are left fairly general in order to allow readers to fill in the blanks, to participate actively in creating the people and places of Middle-earth, a strategy he acknowledges may not work for all readers.

The article provides comprehensive lists of descriptions in the novel while acknowledging the limitations of the methodology. I agree with Agøy’s self-assessment of the weakness of his methodology but would point out that the majority of scholarship that considers Tolkien’s style suffers from the same weakness, rising from the difficulties of dealing with a long and complex text and the limitations of a single reader’s subjective impressions. Further work in this area requires applied linguistics, or stylistics work, such as that done by Michael D. C. Drout in “Tolkien’s Prose Style and Its Literary and Rhetorical Effects” (Tolkien Studies 1 [2004]: 137–63), a rather odd omission in Agøy’s otherwise-excellent review of relevant scholarship on the topic. Another omission, common in Tolkien scholarship generally, also stands out in an essay that spends so much time on Burton Raffel’s early and rather-negative assessment of Tolkien’s work: the failure to address the first scholarship to respond in-depth to Raffel’s essay, Elizabeth D. Kirk’s “ ‘I Would Rather Have Written in Elvish’: Language, Fiction and The Lord of the Rings” (Novel 5 [1971]: 5–18).

Louise Joy, in “Tolkien’s Language” (Hunt 74–87), applies a more linguistic method, analyzing the change in Bilbo’s speech acts over the course of The Hobbit as he moves from the purposeless but polite use of language in his first conversation with Gandalf through his developing facility with language as action in the encounter with Gollum, the direct insults to the spiders in Mirkwood, and his “verbal pyrotechnics” with Smaug, including composing his own riddles (84–85). Joy draws on Ferdinand de Saussure’s theory of langue and parole to consider the question of what specifically identifies The Hobbit as a “children’s book,” arguing the need to consider not what Tolkien’s language means but the narrative techniques, his speech acts, in both narrative and dialogue. The novel appeals to adults as well as children, but Joy’s conclusion that the active language and performativity may be especially appealing to children, for whom the power of speech is relatively fresh, provides an intriguing addition to the body of work on Tolkien’s stylistics. Joy’s essay provides a comprehensive review of...